Saturday, September 23, 2006

Email Marketing at Its Easiest

By Sean Mize

Do you have a mailing list, but you just don’t know what to do to communicate with it? Do you have a web site, and you get some traffic, and you are making sales, and you just know you could make more, if only you were mailing your traffic regularly? Are you simply overwhelmed at the process of writing an email sequence to send to your list? If any of the above are true, you are not alone.

You see, many web businesses do not do the business they could simply because email marketing seems overwhelming.

So how to make it easy?

For each individual, the sticking point is something different. In the next few minutes, I am going to go through each of the sticking points, and give you advice to “unstick” them. If you are not stuck in one point, move on to the next.

1) You must have an auto responder service. An auto responder will mail your mailing list on a regular basis without any intervention from you (after you have written the emails, of course).

2) You must include an opt-in form on your website for people to add their name to your mailing list. Your auto responder company can provide this for you and then you can simply cut and paste the html code into your web site.

3) You must write an email sequence. This is probably one of the hardest things for the beginner to do. Just write like you are writing to a friend. To see an example of how this works, subscribe to a few newsletters or mailing lists online, and keep all the emails. Read them. Decide what you like, what you dislike. What types of emails did you most enjoy reading, and which did you want to delete? The key here is to learn from what others are doing successfully.

4) Use your auto responder’s tracking program to determine which of your emails are being opened (that helps you test your headlines), and to test which of your emails lead to additional clicks to your web site (that allows you to test the effectiveness of your writing).

Just remember that when you are just getting started, there is a long trial and error learning curve. Anytime you learn something, note it, or write it down so you don’t make the same mistake again.

Sean Mize is a successful offline and online entrepreneur and marketer, and is the author of “15 Steps to Internet Success“. To receive a free copy, simply follow this link: Search Engine Marketing

Are you interested in learning how to build a responsive mailing list? Click here: List Building